Research:
The aims and outcomes to date of these health workforce initiatives in PICs, focused as they are on improving healthcare access and health outcomes for rural communities, in particular by training specialists in family/community/rural hospital medicine, are closely aligned with the recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO) in their seminal report, Global strategy on human resources for health: workforce 2030 (26). Those same objectives are similarly aligned at the regional scale with the “Healthy Islands” vision for the Pacific (7). Some of these case studies from the Pacific have, in fact, already been used as exemplars in WHO guidelines for rural workforce development in low- and middle-income countries (27). The rural generalist model is acknowledged to be one of the most strategically valuable and effective means to achieve a higher standard of medical care for rural communities (28), including in island settings (16, 29), such that the establishment of these programmes is certainly timely, if not long overdue.
